her. She did not scutter up the street; she walked as if she had every right to her place on
the sidewalk.
She left my view and I turned back to my desk. As I did so, the framed photograph
which hung on the wall next to my diploma caught my eye, and a terrible shudder worked
through me. My skin – all of it, even the skin on my forehead and the backs of my hands –
crawled up into cold knots of gooseflesh. The most suffocating fear of my entire life fell
on me like a horrible shroud, and I found myself gasping for breath. It was a precognitive
interlude, gentlemen. I do not take part in arguments about whether or not such things can
occur; I know they can, because it has happened to me. Just that once, on that hot early
September afternoon. I pray to God I never have another.
The photograph had been taken by my mother on the day I finished medical school. It
showed me standing in front of White Memorial, hands behind my back, grinning like a
kid who’s just gotten a full-day pass to the rides at Palisades Park. To my left the statue of
Harriet White can be seen, and although the photograph cuts her off at about mid-shin,
the pedestal and that queerly heartless inscription – There is no comfort without pain; thus
we define salvation through suffering – could be clearly seen. It was at the foot of the statue of my grandfather’s first wife, directly below that inscription, that Sandra Stansfield
died not quite four months later in a senseless accident that occurred just as she arrived at
the hospital to deliver her child.
She exhibited some anxiety that fall that I would not be there to attend her during her
labour – that I would be away for the Christmas holidays or not on call. She was partly
afraid that she would be delivered by some doctor who would ignore her wish to use the
Breathing Method and who would instead give her gas or a spinal block.
I assured her as best I could. I had no reason to leave the city, no family to visit over
the holidays. My mother had died two years before, and there was no one else except a
maiden aunt in California … and the train didn’t agree with me, I told Miss Stansfield.
‘Are you ever lonely?’ she asked.
‘Sometimes. Usually I keep too busy. Now, take this.’ I jotted my home telephone
number on a card and gave it to her. ‘If you get the answering service when your labour
begins, call me here.’
‘Oh, no, I couldn’t-‘
‘Do you want to use the Breathing Method, or do you want to get some sawbones
who’ll think you’re mad and give you a capful of ether as soon as you start to
“locomotive”?’
She smiled a little. ‘All right. I’m convinced.’
But as the autumn progressed and the butchers on 3rd Avenue began advertising the
per-pound price of their ‘young and succulent Toms’, it became clear that her mind was
still not at rest She had indeed been asked to leave the place where she had been living
when I first met her, and had moved to the Village. But that, at least, had turned out quite
well for her. She had even found work of a sort. A blind woman with a fairly comfortable
income had hired her to come in twice a week, do some light housework, and then to read
to her from the works of Jean Stratton-Porter and Pearl Buck. She had taken on that
blooming, rosy look that most healthy women come to have during the final trimester of
their pregnancies. But there was a shadow on her face. I would speak to her and she
would be slow to answer … and once, when she didn’t answer at all, I looked up from the
notes I was making and saw her looking at the framed photograph next to my diploma
with a strange, dreamy expression in her eyes. I felt a recurrence of that chill… and her
response, which had nothing to do with my question, hardly made me feel easier.
‘I have a feeling, Dr McCarron, sometimes quite a strong feeling, that I am doomed.’
Silly, melodramatic word! And yet, gentlemen, the response that rose to my own lips
was this: Yes; I feel that, too. I bit it off, of course; a doctor who would say such a thing should immediately put his instruments and medical books up for sale and investigate his
future in the plumbing or carpentry business.
I told her that she was not the first pregnant woman to have such feelings, and would
not be the last. I told her that the feeling was indeed so common that doctors knew it by
the tongue-in-cheek name of The Valley of the Shadow Syndrome. I’ve already mentioned
it tonight, I believe.
Miss Stansfield nodded with perfect seriousness, and I remember how young she
looked that day, and how large her belly seemed. ‘I know about that,’ she said. ‘I’ve felt it.
But it’s quite separate from this other feeling. This other feeling is like … like something
looming up. I can’t describe it any better than that. It’s silly, but I can’t shake it.’
‘You must try,’ I said. ‘It isn’t good for the -‘
But she had drifted away from me. She was looking at the photograph again.
‘Who is that?’
‘Emlyn McCarron,’ I said, trying to make a joke. It sounded extraordinarily feeble.
‘Back before the Civil War, when he was quite young.’
‘No, I recognized you, of course,’ she said. “The woman. Who is the woman?’
‘Her name is Harriet White,’ I said, and thought: And hers will be the first face you see
when you arrive to deliver your child. The chill came back – that dreadful drifting
formless chill. Her stone face.
‘And what does it say there at the base of the statue?’ she asked, her eyes still dreamy,
almost trancelike.
‘I don’t know,’ I lied. ‘My conversational Latin is not that good.’
That night I had the worst dream of my entire life -1 woke up from it in utter terror,
and if I had been married, I suppose I would have frightened my poor wife to death.
In the dream I opened the door to my consulting room and found Sandra Stansfield in
there. She was wearing the brown pumps, the smart white linen dress with the brown
edging, and the slightly out-of-date cloche hat. But the hat was between her breasts,
because she was carrying her head in her arms. The white linen was stained and streaked
with gore. Blood jetted from her neck and splattered the ceiling.
And then her eyes fluttered open – those wonderful hazel eyes – and they fixed on
mine.
‘Doomed,’ the speaking head told me. ‘Doomed. I’m doomed. There’s no salvation
without suffering. It’s cheap magic, but it’s all we have.’
That’s when I woke up screaming:
Her due date of 10 December came and went. I examined her on 17 December and
suggested that, while the baby would almost certainly be born in 1935,1 no longer
expected the child to put in his or her appearance until after Christmas. Miss Stansfield
accepted this with good grace. She seemed to have thrown off the shadow that had hung
over her that fall. Mrs Gibbs, the blind woman who had hired her to read aloud and do
light housework, was impressed with her – impressed enough to tell her friends about the
brave young widow who, in spite of her recent bereavement and delicate condition, was
facing her own future with such determined good cheer. Several of the blind woman’s
friends had expressed an interest in employing her following the birth of her child.
‘I’ll take them up on it, too,’ she told me. ‘For the baby. But only until I’m on my feet
again, and able to find something steady. Sometimes I think the worst part of this -of everything that’s happened – is that it’s changed the way I look at people. Sometimes I
think to myself, “How can you sleep at night, knowing that you’ve deceived that dear old
thing?” and then I think, “If she knew, she’d show you the door, just like all the others.”
Either way, it’s a lie, and I feel the weight of it on my heart sometimes.’
Before she left that day, she took a small, gaily wrapped package from her purse and
slid it shyly across the desk to me. ‘Merry Christmas, Dr McCarron.’
‘You shouldn’t have,’ I said, sliding open a drawer and taking out a package of my own.
‘But since I did, too -‘
She looked at me for a moment, surprised … and then we laughed together. She had
gotten me a silver tie-clasp with the medical symbol on it. I had gotten her an album in